Related papers: Japanese Discourse and the Process of Centering
Why should computers interpret language incrementally? In recent years psycholinguistic evidence for incremental interpretation has become more and more compelling, suggesting that humans perform semantic interpretation before constituent…
Using Japanese honorifics is challenging because it requires not only knowledge of the grammatical rules but also contextual information, such as social relationships. It remains unclear whether pre-trained large language models (LLMs) can…
Sentence-level (SL) machine translation (MT) has reached acceptable quality for many high-resourced languages, but not document-level (DL) MT, which is difficult to 1) train with little amount of DL data; and 2) evaluate, as the main…
Recognizing a basic difference between the semiotics of humans and machines presents a possibility to overcome the shortcomings of current speech assistive devices. For the machine, the meaning of a (human) utterance is defined by its own…
We have been working on speech synthesis for rakugo (a traditional Japanese form of verbal entertainment similar to one-person stand-up comedy) toward speech synthesis that authentically entertains audiences. In this paper, we propose a…
Syntactic parsing, the process of obtaining the internal structure of sentences in natural languages, is a crucial task for artificial intelligence applications that need to extract meaning from natural language text or speech. Sentiment…
It is well-known that speakers who entrain to one another have more successful conversations than those who do not. Previous research has shown that interlocutors entrain on linguistic features in both written and spoken monolingual…
To tackle the vocabulary problem in conversational systems, previous work has applied unsupervised learning approaches on co-occurring speech and eye gaze during interaction to automatically acquire new words. Although these approaches have…
We investigate how verbal and nonverbal linguistic features, exhibited by speakers and listeners in dialogue, can contribute to predicting the listener's state of understanding in explanatory interactions on a moment-by-moment basis.…
Syntactic parsing is the task of assigning a syntactic structure to a sentence. There are two popular syntactic parsing methods: constituency and dependency parsing. Recent works have used syntactic embeddings based on constituency trees,…
In the slot-filling paradigm, where a user can refer back to slots in the context during the conversation, the goal of the contextual understanding system is to resolve the referring expressions to the appropriate slots in the context. In…
When we communicate with other humans, we do not simply generate a sequence of words. Rather, we use our cognitive state (beliefs, desires, intentions) and our model of the audience's cognitive state to create utterances that affect the…
Semantic parsing offers many opportunities to improve natural language understanding. We present a semantically annotated parallel corpus for English, German, Italian, and Dutch where sentences are aligned with scoped meaning…
In this paper, we show how game-theoretic work on conversation combined with a theory of discourse structure provides a framework for studying interpretive bias. Interpretive bias is an essential feature of learning and understanding but…
Discourse analysis is an important task because it models intrinsic semantic structures between sentences in a document. Discourse markers are natural representations of discourse in our daily language. One challenge is that the markers as…
This paper explores whether language models can effectively resolve the complex binding patterns of the Mandarin Chinese reflexive ziji, which are constrained by both syntactic and semantic factors. We construct a dataset of 240 synthetic…
Implicit discourse relations bind smaller linguistic units into coherent texts. Automatic sense prediction for implicit relations is hard, because it requires understanding the semantics of the linked arguments. Furthermore, annotated…
Human talkers often address listeners with language-comprehension challenges, such as hard-of-hearing or non-native adults, by globally slowing down their speech. However, it remains unclear whether this strategy actually makes speech more…
In this paper, we investigate a novel approach for Target Speech Extraction (TSE), which relies solely on textual context to extract the target speech. We refer to this task as Contextual Speech Extraction (CSE). Unlike traditional TSE…
"Kawaii" is the Japanese concept of cute, which carries sociocultural connotations related to social identities and emotional responses. Yet, virtually all work to date has focused on the visual side of kawaii, including in studies of…